Baeris was not surprised to see dragon eggs popping up around the Den's water processing area now that the hydragons had gone 'somewhere else'. What did surprise her was that she knew these eggs already. They had never hatched, in fact they'd been laid quite a long while before. Laid, and... she distinctly recalled that some of them had hatched and grown and wandered off. But the worlds that they were meant to be hatched upon, and in some cases the people attending those eggs before and after, were simply mist in her memory. That meant one thing: they hadn't actually hatched, they hadn't been bonded or sponsored, and perhaps those worlds or people were never-more. The eggs had returned the moment they could, to the only place they'd really known, and that was here at the Den.

As she pondered what to do with this new twist on an apparently old event, Dulath alerted her to a pair of arrivals on the parking lot outside. Dulath was giddy for some reason, and eagerly sped between the entrance to the parking lot and Baeris's side several times before the healer arrived to the broad opening herself.

Two beautiful dragons, as expected according to the urgent gotta-see-them gotta-see-them in her dragon's mind: the brilliantly yellow-gold queen Quisanth, and her sturdy brown mate Nelloth. Old world, very old indeed. But their riders, while they'd once lived on that old world... were different!

It had happened decades before, obviously, but they had both regrown their original fur and tails, ears and muzzles. And apparently, memories that were both theirs and other dimension's doppelgangers. Kitty ahlKhat, Kaytcha as Baeris had once met her, and her own partner Feng 'fluffy' Su, both now approached. Their fur wasn't tossed so much as frizzed up by the travel through the Outside. The same Outside that existed around the Den. They... didn't travel between, like other Pernese dragons, now. Perhaps there was a reason for that.

The reason became clear after a moment, because it wasn't just the pair of feline kin that dropped from the dragons' shoulders. There was a woman in a snug sky-blue leather outfit - and Baeris thought she knew who it was. Something odd about her, not just the highly distracting suit - which if Kalkin had been standing there he would absolutely have been slobbering. Baeris blinked a few times, as the woman approached. The hair on her arms stood up, she did know her.

Not formally, not specifically introduced, but she knew.

"Masterhealer Baeris Kshau, rider of Dulath," Kitty said, her voice the same as her human guise but slightly... purr-ier if that's a thing. She swiveled and the mess of her silvery white hair sproinged a little, "this is kath, Admin One, The End. A ... very good friend of ours."

All those capital letters bounced around in Baeris' mind, this was an important person - like herself, and not. Important but not intimidatingly so, not like Baeris could be. Well, perhaps - that outfit certainly meant business. But her appearance otherwise was fairly sedate: a pasty skinned brown-haired woman who looked considerably younger than she actually must have been. When she came close enough, Baeris got even more of a chilly tingle in her gut and spine: the scent of something so familiar. Not the woman, but the air around her.

She had barely realized there was a hand stuck out in front of her, extended by the shorter woman (not 'short', but Baeris being nearly six feet tall herself almost all women she met were shorter). Absently at first and then with a realization to prod her on, Baeris reached out and grasped that hand, shook it. Firm grip from this woman with no capitalization herself.

"Good to finally see who's taken over this place after so long," kath announced, looking around at the parking lot, its signage above the entry (which had what looked like a wave and a surfer on that wave), "I'd love to see what you've done with the Asteroid."

Another flicker of realization. Baeris knew that before she had 'taken over' this place, it had in fact been in use for a very long while by a group of immortals running a restaurant and mall from it. Parts of that had started showing up, particularly during parties or when the Den was of use in large events like the Checkerboard Ball. Open All Nite, she cringed, they could just have inserted the right letters but no, it was 'nite'. But before they had been there?

kath walked into the wide archway from the parking area and kept looking around herself with a mixture of amazed appraisal and slightly-misty crooks to her eyebrows. "None of this was even built when I was here, but ... that was a very long time ago." She paused, putting her hand on a sign that was written in Braille, English, Zekiran, and half a dozen other languages that indicated directions for several important areas of the Den. "It was just the Asteroid, and me, and the stars."

Baeris, however, tilted her head and asked, "then how did you... survive there?"

"I created it," kath answered, with a shrug, "I was young, I needed some space. Some people noticed me there, helped me out, and eventually I ... well, became who I am."

While many people might have balked at the idea of 'a kid having created a space anomaly', Baeris had in fact been around other people who'd done so. He might show up at any moment himself, given the number of him that were at the Checkerboard Ball, one of them might have gotten lost somewhere in the Den. She got the creeping suspicion that this woman, who stepped carefully into alcoves and peeked into rooms was way, way more than Keenan hinted he was.

Kitty bounced back into view, giggling, "eggs eggs eggs eggs," she said, "I heard there's eggs!"

Before Baeris even thought about asking 'how', Dulath equally sped by with a bounce and engaged Kitty in a circling little happy-dance.

"Eggs that we might help with," Feng said, placing his large dangerously-clawed lion-sized-with-a-thumb hand on Baeris's shoulder. "Eventually they'll get around to talking about it. I hope."

"Oh look there he is," Baeris muttered when Kalkin came into view, and indeed the moment he realized just what that woman was wearing, she heard his intake of breath. He too blinked a bunch, and then vanished back into his lab. She'd find out what he thought later. But for the moment, Baeris finally took charge a little. This was her domain now, and it had been crafted quite well for her needs after the Open All Night people vanished. The Den responded to Baeris by lighting up the hallway a little, in dramatic fashion, complete with sound effects.

The lights indicated her office (with a marquee that had definitely not been there, that was absolutely bleeding out from the restaurant's era) and thus: that was where they wound up. It was bigger and had enough seats to go around than she was used to, and kath made herself at home in the central seat across from Baeris and her desk.

"Dulath told Quisanth about eggs showing up," Kitty said, "and she said something about them being swimmers. Her ... well, her memory seems a little scattered but I guess if the Den was also all that other stuff," she glanced around at the still-open door which looked - even to Baeris - like the brightly lit hallway of a mall's lunch court. "I guess it just means that you need a place for swimming dragons to hatch and find their friends!" She gave off an excited giggle and bounced in the seat.

Queen rider, everyone...

But Baeris leaned in, elbows on the desk and face held by her knuckles, brilliant blue eyes wide and interested. "Tell me more."

The dragons didn't even need to fly, in fact the group didn't have to mount up or actually go to the parking lot.

The Den moved, on her own, to just where and when they would want to rest. Baeris - and everyone else in the Den at that time, including the eggs - felt it gently come to a halt almost like a boat bumping up against a dock. Because it was doing exactly that, in a way. They went back to the edge of the parking lot, and the sky was not static-colored and infinite. It was either early morning or just after sunset, more than likely pre-dawn, with the just-lit slate grey sky and hazy clouds obscuring any horizon that might have otherwise been visible.

The Den was hovering, certainly, in a way that would have caused any real physics to go sideways, but they had never seemed to impact any world's gravity or weather. Over this landscape it was clear that below them was a broad beach and ocean behind them, while on land it was faintly green and grassy. It was kath that stood uneasily at the edge, chuckling to herself about 'still being afraid of heights after all this time'.

But it was also that woman who turned and opened her arms wide. "This is the Pier," she said. "Well, it's over that way by a bit." She tossed her head and to the 'south', "and Kitty's place should be up there a few miles away, right?" To the north, and Kitty nodded. The dragons did not seem likely to start flying them there. kath noticed their hesitation and added, "yeah I wouldn't fly in this right now. Once we land, yeah, but ... we're outside the skybox so that's not a great idea."

"It's... simulated?" Baeris asked.

"No, not... not really, it's just finite in some directions," was the answer. kath didn't seem likely to elaborate. "But yeah if we head a little closer to the party pad there's a great spot for the place to go off."

Kitty nodded enthusiastically once more, "let's gooo!" And the Den listened.

The foggy landscape blurred a bit, and they heard a strange whooshing - the bottom of the Den was dragging in the ocean below. But shortly the fog was much thinner, the sky brighter and actually-sunlit. Looking east with the dawn climbing quickly into day, in fact. Maybe too quickly. Baeris put all that out of her mind and concentrated on examining the area they now hovered over.

"The beach is perfect," she said, "little coves and strands, I like that." It was a broad beach with what looked like almost a quarter-mile worth of tidal marks, quite flat for most of it. Then at its eastern edge, the mixing of long grass and shrubs, the occasional tree - eucalyptus as well as varieties of palm, and twisted red-barked manzanita as well - standing with some amount of clearing between each.

And then there was the 'party pad'. "We can head there once you're sure this is a good place," Kitty announced, as she noticed Baeris looking long and hard at it.

"Was that not just a big blocky building? A warehouse or something?"

"Yup! And now it's my home. I had to rename it, some jerk preacher took the old name and trademarked it. But now it's the Khat House, because Khat."

Baeris expressly understood that Kitty knew what she'd meant: there was a literal rectangle of bleached-white warehouse walls, complete with the occasional half-broken looking window, and catwalks around the upper roof... And then there was this other building in its place. Same configuration, tall with visibly three stories, and much longer than it was wide, but even at this distance Baeris could see that the wide part was huge as well.

"And ... where exactly do you think we should put down?" Baeris asked. She was still squinting into the morning sun but rather sooner than expected her vision cleared and there was actually--

"Oh just in the empty lot! It's right next to the street but that's fine, because then the mall will get business while you're here, right?" Kitty eagerly announced.

There was an empty lot, beyond the street somewhere behind kitty's house, and as the moments went by, so did cars on that street. At some point, they'd moved from one dimension to another. Seamlessly. Still invisibly, though - because no one was crashing their cars at the sight of a half-mile high chunk of space debris hovering over the ocean right near by.

"And the house can be for parties and crash pads and quiet rooms if they're needed. The pool is connected to the bay, if anyone needs to swim." Kitty continued with a fangy grin, and Feng's was exactly as fangy though slightly less surfer-girl-pleased-as-punch.

"We have portals too, in case of emergencies," Feng said, "I don't anticipate needing too much but any hatching might come with surprises."

Baeris, ever the Master Healer, knew that first hand and nodded.

"Do you know how many there are?" kath asked, "I've... never seen a hatching before." She looked a bit off into the distance, squinting, "... least I don't think I have."

"Not yet you haven't!" Kitty appeared to be reminding the human. "Should we be out here for landing or...?"

With that said, Baeris shook her head and indicated that they all, including the dragons, should be somewhere inside. The Den began its descent, moving a little east and away from the direct beach, placing that four-lane street (a freeway, in many realms, sometimes even Highway 101) between its entry and the bulk of the asteroid. That did mean that about four-fifths of it was 'submerged' in the landscape. But again the Den had never experienced any rejection when it paired up with the local landscape. And this landscape was quite amenable to it.

On that note, while the sensation of 'landing' merged with 'merging with the land' subsided, Feng snapped his clawed fingers. "Shoot, wish I had put parking cameras on the exerior," he looked at the stone tunnel, "but I guess that's not really my place to suggest."

"Par...parking cameras," Baeris tapped her chin with a long finger, "Huh. That would be interesting."

"We'll probably be able to see it from the security footage on the east wall," Kitty said from beyond the doorway that led to one of the many observation decks over the 'traditional sands' in the Den. "Oh and Quisanth wants to know how many we have too, Dulath is a little overstimmed right now and doesn't seem to be able to tell her."

Baeris gave a quirked eyebrow and a smirk, "when is my Dulath not overstimulated?"

"A better question is why is she?" Feng commented. "I know dragons gossip like crazy but she came to us with a lot of excited babbling."

Because Mijath is my sister! And her children were parents!

The little greeny-gold dragoness, a queen many times over and the ancestor of so very, very many, was positively glowing, and thankfully not the glowing that came before a mating flight.

Eventually with Kitty and Feng taking a tour guided by said greeny-gold dragon, that left kath with Baeris in her office.

"Why do I know you?" Baeris finally said, free from the worry that the query might anger this person.

"I'm ... a version of the one that made all of this," she held her hands up, looking around, but obviously seeing far more than just the inside of a nicely appointed geneticists office. "She made me first. And I... kind of took that idea and ran with it for a long, long time. I'm a version of god that only exists if god believes in me. I got both the more practical side of her, and the weirdness magnet too."

"God is a woman," Baeris chuckled with a grin.

"Ours is, yes. Others may be different I suppose. We parted ways but she split again and again and I think I've met a ton of those creations too. Like the one lurking in the room next door listening in Kalkin."

Baeris busted out laughing because she almost always would with such a comment.

"But how do you know Kitty and them?" Baeris asked, honest. "I know they had the fur and tails and stuff after our... departure from the Old World. But the Healing Den was separate from that place before then, and I'd been running frenzies and clutches from here for years so I didn't exactly get out much."

There was a long pause, with kath looking introspectively off to one side for most of it. Finally she said, "I raised Kitty. I found her on the coast right where the Den first showed up at the Pier's dimension, actually. Her and her mother. She'd just been born and she was already a dimensional traveler."

"Wait - wait, I thought Mama Tani raised her."

"On Pern perhaps, as a human maybe." kath shrugged, "but her mother Leticia had been all over the place with her friends on their ship, and wound up passing through a nasty dimension storm. Got separated from the ship, gave birth literally on a raft, and washed up through the Thousand Shores passageway. Kitty knows a ... slightly different version of the story, but I'll let her keep that one for herself."

Baeris's eyes had gone wide, concerned, but obviously everyone was fine in the end.

Everyone was fine in The End, that went through her mind moments later. Baeris had heard of it, and realized: "I ... saw you when I was a child, didn't I?"

kath finally cracked a very sneaky smile. "You and almost everyone else in our lives, yes."

The smell of carnival popcorn and sawdust, sea air and clove cigarettes came through Baeris's memories. The knee-height view of a child racing through what she only could call a Hold Gather, but she knew now was absolutely not on Pern. Somewhere south on the coast taking that same winding street (two-laned at that point) was a gate, leading into a dirt road that was tucked between coastal hills and rocky beach. A small playground, but busy with carnival rides and tourists, music from small speakers (she thought it had been from Harpers on a stage somewhere), several strange conical pillars that people continually ducked around.

They wouldn't come out when they went behind them. But other people did. Baeris stared hard at this woman, "what is that place?"

"The End is my home, my realm, I'm Admin there."

"Admin One, that's... what they said yes..." She paused, "I - don't have to know any of that. Do I."

"Nah, you'd forget anyway." kath admitted. "You'll probably forget about me unless I show up again a couple times. I'm not from your dimension - if I'm visiting, no one really remembers unless I purposefully tell them to. It saves me some weird temporal issues."

Baeris didn't ask any further questions, but she did want to. However, they'd apparently 'parked', and the exterior was now ready to be explored. The Den would be safely hidden in plain sight, as an indoor mall built up with a 'nature buff' theme on the exterior complete with hiking and axe throwing and archery areas...

By the time the women and their furry companions - and their dragons - were leaving the healer's office, there were already newly opened shops like a t-shirt imprint place that had "I went to the Khat House and All I Got Was This Shirt" shirts draping its many hangers. The parking lot was far from 'full' but there were already a dozen vehicles parked, with people lookking for restrooms and lunch courts and ...

The wafting scent of burgers alerted Baeris to the fact that the Open All Night people had come back to run their restaurant, for the duration. Maybe she'd introduce herself. Maybe they'd comp her some burgers.

The upshot of all this, is that:

The Swim hatchings technically occur on a world that is simultaneously Twoarth (where Carramba High is), The Pier (which is 'near' it dimensionally), and The End (which is where most of my characters set in that universe even come from originally).

The hosts of the overall event are Kitty Khat and Feng Su:

The venue will have all the modern bells and whistles - the Khat House (this image is technically the Zekiran version, because of course it is) has a massive number of bedrooms and crash rooms, at least two kitchens, music from literally a hundred worlds that can be piped into every single room individually, and a tanning garden with the windows each showing a different star and since it's summer you'd better bring your sunblock or get quite the deep tan even if you're a vampire. (Vampires don't suffer from their normal issues here, ... honest!)

Each separate clutch may have up to 5 (typically 2 or 3) different image versions. Originally these were slated to be the only offspring, but with the event being delayed so very, very long, all these eggs have been piling up and they will now serve only as lineart for different sets of eggs. Eggs will be detailed with their own information as they become available. Character offspring will continue to be unique, however.

Please link back to THIS PAGE for the event overall, or to the individual clutch info pages as they become available. The list of clutches will be found here when they are updated.

Overall Info - because the eggs were lost to time for quite a long while, they may have new abilities, colorations, and bond choices than they would have if the clutch had gone out 20 years ago. The "Random Generator" for extra appearance, bond, personality, and available powers" applies to ALL DRAGONS unless specifically forbidden (which is highly unlikely). Bonding is required for many but not all clutches, but may include non-humans, dragons, constructs, etc. (The original list was quite extensive:

And it still applies today - if a thing can handle the routine of helping out a hatchling dragon in any way, including "getting people with thumbs" or "with the use of telekinetic powers" or "magically produces needed items", they're in and fine. Bonds can be from any world, as long as they're your work to create an alternate version of an existing or 'in-fandom' character also good to go. Multiple bonding is highly likely to occur but will be checked for some clutches as they might not like being intruded upon 'their one'... But for the time being, sponsorships and collections are just fine too. I just want to get these out there.

Current clutches last updated on linked pages 7.31.24*

	Chishikith + Azalin
	Chishikith + Ombak
	Dalnia + Seiraliess
	Emaeliass + Vandrin
	Eternity + Hullam
	Ezust + Elnök
	Gnodensyith + Lokkith *whoopsed the link
	Kaaranouss + Dialess Sesske
	Kaaranouss + Hitasuk